My Week with the Terrorists

From: http://dr-detroit.blogspot.com/

So what comes to mind when you think of masked, armed, and furious men?

Democracy? Social justice? Education and healthcare? Organic farming?

So it is with the Zapatistas, as we learned in our week-long excursion to Chiapas, Mexico.

Our journey began, as so many do, with a long day of third-world transportation. This one began at 5:00 AM. By 8:00 we reached the seedy little town of Huehuetenango, where, while we waited for our driver to reappear, we had a pleasant little encounter with a local drunk. Gallo (Guatemalan beer) in one hand, Cup of Noodles in the other, he stumbled up to the open back door of the bus and engaged us with the usual pleasantries: “What the fuck are you guys doing here??” He dropped his gloves and got right down to business. “You’re all white trash!!” He then accused one of our directors of starting slavery. She’s black. Good start right? Just wait. Then, thinking it was a straw, he tried to drink out of the fork in his Cup of Noodles. How do you top that? Well, you could pull down your shorts and start pissing on the bus. It was time to close the door. We thought that was the last of him, but apparently he still had more to say. Furious, and not as dumb as we’d supposed, he realized that he could still get on the bus through the front door. He started right up with another barrage of anti-Americana. I guess he earned it though, found the front door and all. “You don’t know me,” he shouted angrily…but then with a touch of sadness, “you don’t even know yourselves.” With that, I though he’d outdone himself, but then out of nowhere, he lays this one down: “You closed the door on me like you closed the door on the world!” Oh SNAP!

It went back and forth for a while more between entertaining and nauseating, but it got pretty ugly by the end, and pretty sad. It wasn’t too hard to figure out he’d been an immigrant (this was all in English), and had probably been deported. Eventually the driver returned and made him leave, but not before his grand finale: he ripped up a US one dollar bill and through it at us. We kept pretty quiet the rest of the way to the border.

After passing through customs and another four hours on the road, we arrived at our destination at near dark. Through an almost impenetrable fog, a road sign boldly declared our arrival into another world. “You are in Zapatista territory,” it read. “Here the people demand and the government obeys.” At long last. From behind a gated entrance a masked man greeted us and asked for our passports. Moments later we were ushered through the gate and into a reception-type hut where two more masked men inquired into the purpose of our visit. They knew we were coming of course, but as we soon learned, Zapatistas spare no formalities. Having gained their approval, we were shuffled off to visit the junta, the rotating Zapatista governing body. We learned we were in Catacol Oventic, one of the Zapatista headquarters. Catacol literally means snail, whose spiral shape is meant to be a metaphor for its purpose: a place where the inside meets the outside. And despite the masks and security, it is completely unarmed.

Let me take this opportunity to fill you in on a bit of the Zapatista back story. In 1994, a socialist revolution exploded in the south of Mexico, in the highly indigenous territories of Chiapas. It had been planned covertly for the past ten years by urban intellectuals who had sympathized with the marginalized indigenous populations, in conjunction with the local indigenous leaders. As a result, it was the most organized resistance this part of the world had ever witnessed. And it caught on like wildfire, especially by the middle class, who themselves knew the frustrations of a non-responsive, corrupt government. Originally, the Zapatistas had hoped to gain enough support to change the government by the sheer influence of their presence, but despite their growing popularity, the Mexican government did what it does best, act corruptly non-responsive. Militarily outmatched, the Zapatistas had no choice but to disengage and withdrawn themselves utterly from the political dialogue. If Mexico wasn’t going to provide them the basic human needs and rights that they demanded, like schools and medical care, than they would have to provide it all themselves.

What most interested us were their efforts with respect to healthcare. They had done something very unique for our times. They had, out of necessity, essentially built a system from scratch. Without doctors. Without medical schools. Without equipment and funding. Relying entirely on volunteer labor. And we wanted to see if it worked.

So does it? Well, kind of. It’s not pretty, but it’s something, and in the context of the obstacles they face, it’s something admirable. We spent our week in the caracol living in camping-like conditions, much like the impoverished Zapatistas, cooking our own food, and each day visiting different clinics and healthcare centers established throughout the Zapatista region. Some were pretty scary, only barely exceeding the classification of “shack,” but others were remarkably advanced, with labs and the capability even to perform minor surgical procedures. There were a few commonalities, however, that impressed us everywhere we went. For one, traditional herbal remedies are very popular, both for cultural and financial reasons. More strikingly, however, sexual education, contraceptives, and family planning all seemed considerably less taboo within the socially open-minded Zapatista ideological framework, a stark contrast to the suffocating conservative mentality that marks the region.

We learned a few more interesting facts about the Zapatistas during the week. For one, international intelligence agencies love to send in their spies for training purposes because, if discovered, the Zapatistas won’t kill them. Also, the Zapatistas love art. Almost every inch of every wood plank or cinderblock that they claim as their own is covered with some elaborate mural. It’s bizarre, to see portraits of men in masks, an image we so closely associate with violence, extremism, and terrorism, to be surrounded by icons of peace and prosperity, liberty, and tolerance. To give you an idea, there was one mural of a Zapatista, holding hands with representatives of the various races of the world, all smiling beneath a rainbow. Of course, not everyone was able to distinguish a difference, since the Zapatistas are classified by the United States as a terrorist organization.

To be sure, their rhetoric of absolute anti-capitalist, anti-globalized, anti-neoliberalist socialism puts a bad taste in the mouth of almost every free-market minded outsider, but on closer inspection one discovers that this rhetoric really doesn’t reflect their true ideology. To the Zapatistas, capitalism is synonymous with sweatshops, globalization with monopolies, and neoliberalism with exploitation. These stunted, polarized views, of course, are not accurate understandings of these principles…but if that’s what you thought the words meant, wouldn’t you be against them too? It is an unflattering and unfortunate lost-in-translation that discredits their better intentions, but it should not be misconstrued as their ideology. After all, as we pointed out, the numerous cooperatives that they’ve established (coffee co-ops, handicraft co-ops, textile co-ops, etc.) are actually perfectly capitalist structures themselves…albeit healthier ones that guarantee higher wages.

We spend our last day in the lovely, cultured, affluent metropolis of San Cristobal, home to music, fine food, and even a gelateria! If that doesn’t put the contrast into perspective, I don’t know what will. Modern San Cristobal is a strange dichotomy, a perfect picture of both Zapatista achievement and failure. As you know, the Mexican economy relies heavily on tourism, but much to their chagrin violent socialist revolutions have a tendency to damage that industry. So naturally Mexico’s response to Zapatismo, and its draining effect on tourism, was to pour money into San Cristobal and resurrect it as a tourist haven. This, in a way, is exactly what the Zapatistas always wanted: to force the government to start investing in their territory. But every force has its equal and opposite, and as San Cristobal was revived, the Zapatista demands were somehow compromised… all that the outsiders saw of Chiapas now was a vibrant, blooming city, the cries of suffocating poverty just outside the walls had been successfully soundproofed, and suddenly the idea of demanding recognition and respect was met with little sympathy.

When we got back to the Guatemalan border, we had to pass through immigrations again, located within the four kilometer stretch of no man’s land that separates the two countries. As I emerged from the immigrations office, stamped passport in hand, my friend Aaron, sitting on his backpack, looked up at me and welcomed me to limbo. “If this is limbo,” said his wife from beside him, “than which way is hell?” I smiled, looked back at Chiapas, now behind us, and then on to Guatemala, just around the bend.

Good question.

Posted by Doctor Detroit